As we move into 2013 and attempt a glance further into the future, we see shifts in the conversation around cloud collaboration. I’ve outlined a few thoughts on what we can expect soon, over the course of the next few years, and in the future.

In 2013, we’ll see the cloud conversation shift to flexibility and agility as primary drivers of adoption.

“Businesses will have to provide an environment in which their employees are connected in ways they have never been connected before.”

As more companies understand the problems that arise in the collection of big data and the number of employees who work outside the office increases, cloud adoption will grow exponentially. Gartner data shows 71 percent of businesses adopted Software as a Service (SaaS) within the past three years, with three quarters of businesses planning on increasing SaaS spending. However, the reason companies increasingly invest in SaaS will shift. As a recent Forrester survey shows, a decreasing number of businesses are prioritizing lower costs as a reason to adopt SaaS, while an increasing number of businesses are focusing on “business agility” as a reason to deploy a SaaS solution.

In order to compete effectively in the future, businesses will have to provide an environment in which their employees are connected in ways they have never been connected before – connecting employees to customers, partners, and suppliers real time, anytime, anywhere, and providing context to these collaborative sessions.  This can only be accomplished through leveraging an increasing set of collaborative technology, and exposing the most relevant data across the traditional mediums of voice, video, and chat. Cloud accelerates the roll-out of this technology consistently across entire companies and their business partners, so they can improve the efficiency of their decision-making and the quality of their customers’ experience. As the cloud and macroeconomic factors increase the speed of business and collaboration, businesses will look to the cloud to as a means to deploy the growing set of integrated collaborative tools and gain a competitive edge.

As cloud collaboration moves beyond early adopters in 2013, hybrid models will proliferate and customers will increasingly demand a seamless, uncompromising user experience between the cloud and the customer premises.

“More than 50 percent of enterprises began cloud migrations in 2011.”

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Tags: Cisco, cloud, collaboration, enterprise social software, Internet of Everything, IoE, mobility, TelePresence, twitter, video

Over the next decade, your industry will undergo radical change. How you bring products to market. How you organize your company and your teams. How people perform their jobs. The rule books we’ve relied on don’t apply anymore.

But this isn’t a time for fear or anxiety. Peter Drucker said it best:  “Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business—in demographics, in values, in technology or science—and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.”

In 1971, when FedEx founder Fred Smith said he was going to deliver mail by jets, most thought he was crazy. In 1980, the creators of Whole Foods broke the mold when they entered a mature industry—with razor thin margins and driven by sales and coupons—and introduced the idea of charging premium prices for fresh, organic groceries.  And when Apple announced opened its first retail store in 2001, Newsweek ran an article titled Read More »

Tags: Apple, Change, collaboration, FedEx, Newsweek, Peter Drucker, Whole Foods

As many of you know, the term “Black Friday” is commonly used to describe the Friday immediately after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday--the busy shopping day when many retailers begin to turn a profit for the year. Black Friday signals the start of the holiday shopping season, with its accompanying surge in the need for customer support. We can all think of examples of the latter: the frantic web searches to get our childrens’ gifts working properly, the calls to return a sweater that was the wrong size--sound familiar?

The holiday season is the acid-test of customer care in many industries. Businesses that fail the test will lose customers--often in droves--while those who delight their customers can surge ahead of the competition.

So how can businesses succeed--and excel--in providing world-class customer service even during this most challenging of seasons? The answer lies in properly leveraging the 3 Waves of Customer Care:  Cost, Relationship, and Experience. You can read about the details in this Read More »

Tags: Black Friday, collaboration, contact center, Customer Care, enterprise social software, mobile, video

Based on the conversations I have every day with Cisco customers, the impact of mobility on organizations cannot be denied.

Abundant data details how the proliferation of mobile devices is affecting communications, collaboration, and the way we do business today. For example, Cisco recently commissioned a Forrester Research report that looks at mobility, virtualization, and other enterprise-level technology initiatives. Nearly half the firms surveyed are implementing “bring your own device” (BYOD) programs to support employee-owned devices.

I’ve outlined my position in the past: BYOD is an opportunity, not a threat. There are profound benefits for organizations that embrace BYOD and mobilize the collaboration experience.

Collaboration is increasingly taking place on personal and company-provided mobile devices. According to a Read More »

Tags: Bring your Own Device (BYOD), Cisco IBSG, Cisco Services, collaboration, enterprise tablets, Forrester Research, mobile collaboration, Smartphones, survey

Mary Meeker’s “2012 Internet Trends Report put just about every industry on alert: her persuasive argument urged leaders to re-imagine nearly everything about their businesses in no uncertain terms--from advertising, to mobile to media consumption.” – Forbes, August

When Mary Meeker speaks, people listen. When she releases her annual report, people really listen. Count me on that list. Meeker, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, recently released the updated version of her report. In it she covers the high points on the trend front, including:

• The dominance of Windows in the operating system world is diminishing (covered in a previous post)
• The number of people using the internet now includes 34% of the global population.
• Worldwide smartphone subscriptions of 42% promises to increase penetration beyond its current 17% of the mobile market.
• Global shipments of Android phones have grown nearly six times as fast as iPhones since their respective launches.
• 29% of adults in the United States own tablets or e-readers compared to 2% in mid-2009.
• Global mobile data traffic is increasing while fixed network traffic is decreasing.

I have a good left-brain, right-brain thing going. I like graphs, charts, and data. But I also like to look at how trends translate into what we do and how we do it. Meeker calls it a “re-imagination of nearly everything.” Essentially, devices, connectivity, and user experience are creating change in how we do – well — nearly everything.

Meeker quotes Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on a similar angle: Read More »

Tags: collaboration, Mary Meeker, social media, TelePresence, WebEX, WebEx Social, Wikipedia